For the second year in a row, San Diego Gas & Electric has topped an industry magazine's ranking of brainy utilities for its efforts in building a "smart grid" and its spending on information technology.

Intelligent Utility magazine ranked electric utilities based on how much money they took in per employee, how much electricity they get from renewable sources, their investments on smart grid and information technology and efforts designed to get customers to cut energy usage overall and at the most critical times.

SDG&E, it said, ranked at "near genius" levels compared to other utilities.

Smart grid generally describes efforts to use sensors and computers to more efficiently produce, distribute and use electricity. In addition to smart-meters — which SDG&E is in the process of rolling out — it also includes sensors in transformers, substations and generating plants.

The magazine noted that the federal government is spending $11 billion in stimulus grants on smart grid projects.

SDG&E's most ambitious proposal for some of that funding, however, was rejected in November. The company lost out on $100 million in grants it was seeking for a $213 million smart-grid demonstration project.

Still, a spokeswoman notes the company got $28 million for a communications infrastructure (for which it is spending $34 million of its own money) and $10 million to study a "microgrid" in Borrego Springs.

"We plan to demonstrate how to maintain reliability in a more complex grid, leverage distributed resources to benefit the community and electric system, enable more active participation by customers, and maintain power – or 'ride through' an outage – even when the larger grid is experiencing problems," April Bolduc said.